The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice – All Rise – Medium

In 1996, legal scholar Carrie Menkel-Meadow wrote that oppositional presentation of facts — that is, the adversarial system as taught through the Socratic method — may not be the best way to arrive at the truth. “Polarized debate,” she wrote, “simply distorts the truth, leaves out important information, simplifies complexity, and obfuscates rather than clarifies.” Menkel-Meadow explained that “truth is illusive, partial, interpretable, dependent on the characteristics of the knowers as well as the known, and, most importantly, complex.” Likewise, criminal justice scholar Katherine van Wormer lamented in 2009 that the adversarial system hearkens back to “primitive practices related to combat”; Australian professor and former attorney Kate Galloway called it a “performance piece.” Restorative justice, by contrast, has been called humanistic.